Quarterly Business Reviews are your most valuable opportunity to evidence the value and innovation you bring to your client. That's why it's so important to have the right people, including Account Managers and senior leadership, involved in your Business Review process.
In May 2024, Clientshare hosted a Virtual Panel with QBR experts from OCS Group UK and CEVA Logistics. Here is their advice on how to get the right people to attend your QBRs.
Transcript:
James: So in terms of the people that attend, how do you try and ensure that you get the right people to attend from your customer side of things? Is there anything specific that happens at OCS or CEVA to try and make sure you get the right people in the room?
Claire: I think for us it's understanding who the stakeholders holders are from our customer side. What their drivers are, what they want to get out of the reviews, and ensuring that we're aligned. I know we were discussing earlier the impact of ESG - we've got a great team in that respect now that we bring into these meetings. So absolutely, I think the more aligned and engaged we are with our customers, the more tailored our QBRs then become.
And, for me, even bringing in different people, I think that's fresh in itself - we're always wanting take a fresh approach - and bringing different faces around the table is a huge positive.
James: Jon, from your perspective?
Jon: Very similar, actually. I think one of the one of the things we really try to do in CEVA is be really clear on our stakeholder mapping. So, when we're setting the cadence of our meetings, be really clear with the customer on what those meetings are designed to be there for, but also taking feedback on what the customer would like to take from those meetings.
There's ample opportunity to be looking back, and managing metrics. If you don't set aside the right audience from both sides to sit down, and the QBR is quite often the right juncture, sometimes at our ABR (Annual Business Review), to align on those opportunities. It's something that can be easily missed.
The other thing that we always are really keen to do is share best practice and help with thought leadership with our customers. So we're really lucky in CEVA - it's a really diverse customer set and it's a diverse business. So, regularly we'll cross pollinate and send guest speakers - so I'll be out often attending guest speaking spots in other sectors, even outside of contract logistics and vice versa - and we'll bring other parts of business to come and explain to the customer what else we can do and provide.
James: I think that something that that you've just said - or both of you said actually - really struck a chord me and it's around the stakeholder mapping. It sounds like something that you both do well as two organisations, and there are obviously many other organisations out there who will sit there and say we must go and map out our stakeholders.
The piece I think that I'd like to explore a little bit more is how you make sure that you align people correctly for the right meetings. So with the notion of Quarterly Business Reviews, what we hear a lot is that there's a lot of people who don't attend. You have a cast of thousands who are due to attend, and then people drop out.
So I'm particularly interested about how you pair off or make sure that, from both sides, you get those key people to align because you will normally have a vendor manager and account manager who sort of dovetail and work closely to each other - how do you try and map the relationships further up? Sponsor to senior stakeholder, how do you try and map those relationships as opposed to just the relationships between account management and and the day-to-day contacts? Is there anything you do specifically in that space?
Jon: Basically, what we try and do is a quadrant exercise to say, out of the four quadrants being: strategic, operational, project-driven and functional - which of the stakeholders from each side of the pitch fits into one of those quadrants? And then we'll suggest to the customer that perhaps the guys that sit in the strategic box over here should be speaking together, the operational guys [should do the same] obviously on a monthly basis, but that's how we approach them who should be speaking to who.
I think the bigger challenge is making that a compelling offer to the customer to want to turn up. The thing that we really strive to do is deliver interesting content which will bring the customer and Clientshare is a really good way to do that, because you can distribute reviews to a wider audience and get people to see, 'actually that some of the content there might be interesting for me to turn up and attend that review', so that's I think one of the tougher challenges but one that the tech you put out can combat.
James: I have to say the idea of the quadrant certainly resonates with me and I'm certain it would with some of your customers as well. And in the OCS world, in the Facilities Management space, how does that work?
Claire: I think very similar to what Jon says but, for us, preparation key. We try and get all our QBRs diarised at the beginning of the year so there's plenty of time, we understand, again, strategically what our customers are looking for, and we can ensure that we've got that right level of engagement.
Also utilising CRM tools to advise us as to when someone was last engaged with. We're a huge business so if we've got a diary of activity against key stakeholders at all levels, if that's being missed, we need to obviously re-energise or get somebody back into those positions and pick up those relationships for us. So I think that visibility and transparency in that respect is key for us through CRM. But, like Jon said, it is all about understanding what the outputs of those sessions want to be, get people effectively mapped, and address it in that way.
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